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When police showed up at Rebecca DePietro's Connecticut home a few months ago asking if anyone had seen a suspicious person around the neighborhood, "I was like, yeah I can draw a picture of him," DePietro tells NBC Connecticut. But, she says, "it wasn’t like the best picture, it was just a head and some legs and I thought, 'oh he’s probably just going to crumple it up and throw it out.'" Instead, police used the sketch—NBC says they "superimposed" the image and matched it up with a picture of the suspect—and it led them to a man who ultimately confessed to 10 local burglaries.

In an era when every moment is tweeted and politicized, Bernie Sanders elected not to capitalize on a meaningful meeting with the mother of Sandra Bland. The chance encounter reportedly took place at East Street Café, a Thai restaurant at Union Station in Washington, D.C., five days before the first Democratic presidential debate. The Rev. Hannah Adair Bonner, a pastor at St. John’s Church in downtown Houston, wrote in her blog about noticing the Vermont senator at another table while she was eating dinner with Geneva Reed-Veal, whose daughter became a face of the Black Lives Matter campaign following her death in police custody in July.

Clinton talked about her long history with the Alamo City, where she lived for three months when she was 24 and working on the Texas campaign of 1972 Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern. She recalled that she had come to the state with a fellow campaign worker, her boyfriend, who sported a beard and a head of bushy hair. “He looked kind of like a Viking,” she said of future president Bill Clinton. Her comments on guns came amid controversy surrounding Texas’s new “campus carry” law, which allows those with licenses to carry handguns into university buildings and classrooms.

Hillary Rodham Clinton went Thursday to the epicenter of the gun-rights movement and declared that “I will not be silenced” in her advocacy for new firearms restrictions. It was a none-too-subtle rebuke of her opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I), who said in their debate this week that he had been constrained on the issue by the politics of his home state of Vermont. Clinton’s comments came as the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination held a Latino organizing rally here — and picked up the endorsement of the city’s former mayor, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro.

U.S. law enforcement officials revealed the hack attempts on Wednesday at a conference of American energy firms who were meeting about national security concerns. "ISIL is beginning to perpetrate cyberattacks," Caitlin Durkovich, assistant secretary for infrastructure protection at the Department of Homeland Security, told company executives. Investigators would not reveal any details to CNNMoney -- or cite evidence of specific incidents. But they did say the attacks by the Islamic State have been unsuccessful. Terrorists are not currently using the most sophisticated hacking tools to break into computer systems and turn off or blow up machines.

A Colorado prosecutor says her office does not plan to file any charges against a man who allegedly voted in Kansas after doing so Colorado. Yuma County District Attorney Brittny Lewton said Friday that Lincoln L. Wilson did not commit perjury or voter fraud because he voted first in Colorado. She says it did not become fraud until he went to Kansas several days later and cast a second ballot, and any perjury and double voting occurred in Kansas. Lewton says her office conducted an investigation, and sent Kansas its findings. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach has filed 10 criminal charges, including three felony counts, in Sherman County against the 64-year-old voter.

In an angry speech on Wednesday night, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, appealed for calm but accused Israeli security forces of killing Palestinian boys “in cold blood,” singling out the 13-year-old Manasra as one of the Palestinian youths Israel had “executed.” The Palestinian press, and even some American newspapers, dutifully included Abbas’ charge and displayed photos of the bleeding Manasra sprawled out on a Jerusalem street in their coverage of the monthlong wave of stabbings and other violence by Palestinians against Israelis, the worst violence since Israel’s war last year with militant Hamas, which rules Gaza. Seven Israelis have been killed this month in some 28 attacks, many of them in Jerusalem, while Israeli security forces have killed 30 Palestinians suspected of carrying out such attacks or in other violent protests.

President Barack Obama said the U.S. has reached an agreement with Russia to avoid clashes in the skies as their air forces conduct bombing raids in Syria, though he added that the world powers remain far apart in their approach to the conflict. “The only understanding that we’ve arrived at is how do we ‘deconflict’ in the event that our planes and their planes might be occupying similar space over Syrian skies,” Obama said Friday at a White House news conference. “So in that sense we’ve arrived at an understanding and some channels for communication. Where we will continue to differ is in the basic set of principles and strategies we’re pursuing inside of Syria.” He spoke hours after Russia said the parties were close to signing the accord on military-to-military communications.

CBS has refused to run advertising for Truth, the film starring Cate Blanchett and Robert Redford that revisits a painful episode in the network's past involving a discredited 2004 news story on former President George W. Bush's military service record. CBS has denounced the movie, which opens Friday, as a disservice to the public and journalists. Redford plays Dan Rather in the film, with Blanchett as producer Mary Mapes. Together, the journalists were behind a 60 Minutes II story that questioned Bush's Vietnam War-era commitment to service in the Texas Air National Guard. But CBS apologized for the story after documents used were called into question and couldn't be verified. Mapes and three news executives were fired. The film is told from the points of view of Mapes and Rather, who left CBS News on bitter terms in 2006.

Bloomberg Television interviewed Donald Trump today and he had tough words for Osama bin Laden Mohammed Atta Al Qaeda George W. Bush. Anchor Stephanie Ruhle asked The Donald if voters could trust him to keep America safe and if he would provide the “comforter-in-chief” role as Bush did after 9/11 and Obama after the Sandy Hook shooting.

Former senator Ted Kaufman, a longtime top adviser to Vice President Biden, offered clues about Biden’s presidential deliberations in a letter to supporters Thursday night, saying that Biden will run a “campaign from the heart” if he enters the 2016 race. Kaufman hinted that Biden is close to making a decision. “I am confident that the Vice President is aware of the practical demands of making a final decision soon,” Kaufman said in his letter, a copy of which was obtained by The News Journal. “He has been in public and political life a long time and he has a good grip on the mechanics around this decision.”

Jon Gabriel (a.k.a., @ExJon on Twitter) is a political writer and marketing consultant, contributing articles to Ricochet, The Blaze, FreedomWorks and the Heartland Institute. Until 2012, he served as Director of Marketing for the free-market Goldwater Institute, where he converted policy initiatives into compelling stories. In the private sector, Jon led marketing efforts for Cold Stone Creamery, Honeywell, and several technology companies. In his spare time he helped create a political satire blog, garnering several notices from Rush Limbaugh, Hugh Hewitt, National Review, The New York Times and other media outlets. Jon is a summa cum laude graduate of Arizona State's Cronkite School of Journalism and is a former submarine reactor operator for the U.S. Navy. When not obsessing about the news, he obsesses about the Green Bay Packers, Arizona Diamondbacks and indie rock. He lives in Mesa, Ariz., with his long-suffering wife and two precocious daughters.

Sarah Ray's father and grandparents were in a car crash on the way to her wedding reception, the off-duty Tennessee paramedic rushed to the scene in her wedding dress. Trump was appalled at the extent to which he felt Clinton moved to the left to compete with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, whom he calls a communist/socialist and a “maniac.”

Common Core backers are sneaking a social and political agenda into nationalized curriculum, say critics, who now have new ammo in a writing lesson plan for teachers that they say gives a slanted perspective of the gun debate. Concerned parents and longtime critics of Common Core say that this is just another example of flaws associated with the federally-imposed standards. While Common Core itself is not technically a curriculum, it drives classroom lessons by imposing a standard, nationalized test. Both private and nonprofit curriculum providers tout their material for its alignment with the standards tested in the Common Core examinations.

Nevada regulators on Thursday ruled that playing daily fantasy sports should be considered gambling, not a game of skill, and ordered websites like DraftKings and FanDuel to stop operating immediately in that state until the companies and their employees receive state gaming licenses. The decision by the Nevada Gaming Commission was the latest blow to a booming yet unregulated industry that has faced intense scrutiny in recent days, including federal and state inquiries into the business practices of the two major companies.

China has passed the United States in the number of billionaires it boasts, driven by the rise of fortunes in technology and manufacturing, according to a survey released Thursday. Despite a cooling economy, the number of Chinese billionaires rose by 242 this year to 596, according to the Hurun Report, which follows China's wealthy. It said that surpassed the 537 the company found in the United States. The report reflected the success of online retailing, entertainment, and other service businesses, while traditional industries such as steel and natural resources have declined. No. 1 on this year's list is Wang Jianlin, chairman of Wanda Group, which operates hotels, shopping malls, and cinemas, at $34.4 billion, up 52% from last year.

A distant star is getting a lot of attention from astronomers – possibly as a sign that alien life is out there. The star KIC 8462852 was discovered through Planet Hunters, a citizen science program at Yale University. Taking data from the Kepler Space Telescope, volunteers go searching for signs of a drop in light due to orbiting exoplanets crossing in front of their parent stars. KIC 8462852 is 1,481 light years away from Earth.

At a campaign stop in rural Iowa on Wednesday, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz told ThinkProgress that activists with the Black Lives Matter movement — people who have been peacefully protesting the murder of black men and women by law enforcement — are “literally suggesting and embracing and celebrating the murder of police officers.” When ThinkProgress asked Cruz if he’d be willing to sit down for a meeting with Black Lives Matter activists, he said “sure, I’m happy to meet with just about anybody.” But then he elaborated that the activists were threatening police officers. “If you look at the Black Lives Matter movement, one of the most disturbing things is more than one of their protests have embraced rabid rhetoric, rabid anti-police language, literally suggesting and embracing and celebrating the murder of police officers,” the Texas senator said. “That is disgraceful.”

Republican front-runners Donald Trump and Ben Carson are threatening to pull out of the next Republican primary debate if the hosts don't agree to their demands. In a letter to CNBC, which is hosting the next debate, the two candidates said they would not participate in the Oct. 28 debate "if it is longer than 120 minutes including commercials and does not include opening and closing statements." In a conference call between Republican National Committee officials and top advisers to the presidential campaigns on Thursday, Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski also said that Trump would consider skipping the debate if his terms were not met.

The Texas high school football coach suspected of directing his players to blindside an official in a game told an investigative panel on Thursday that he did not order the hit, and was given a one-season suspension for his behavior on the sidelines. John Jay High School secondary coach Mack Breed said he made comments that included profanities in anger about an official's call in the game last month while on the sidelines but that they were not directed at any players on his team. A few plays later, two players on the team ran over the official. "If they were in that area and they heard that, maybe they took action on that," Breed told a panel from the governing body for school sports in Texas, the University Interscholastic League.